La Tête d'un homme

1933, France, directed by Julien Duvivier

Rating: ****

Quite a shift from his previous film, Poil de Carotte, this is one of the earliest appearances of George Simenon's Maigret character: Jean Renoir and Jean Tarride both filmed Maigret stories the previous year, and those were, as it happens, the only other Maigret films of the 1930s. The film isn't a whodunit - we know more or less from the beginning of the movie who is responsible, and Maigret (played by Harry Baur) quickly sees the lie of the land - but rather a how-can-I-prove-it, which allows for frissons aplenty as we follow the apparently remorseless killer.

Whereas Poil de Carotte focused particularly on inner lives, Duvivier is more interested here in power relationships and how the different characters interact with one another. He underlines these relationships through the placement of his actors - like above, when prime suspect Heurtin, played by the apparently massive Alexandre Rignault at the very beginning of his film career, shrinks back from the much smaller Radek (Valéry Inkijinoff). Maigret, too, dominates Heurtin, with the inspector quickly realizing that Heurtin's bulk is not matched by his wits. Later in the film, Duvivier shoots Heurtin in a manner that explicitly equates him with Frankenstein's monster as incarnated in the 1930s Universal movies directed by James Whale. There's a brief scene where the "monster" looms over a young girl, swiftly followed by a shot where Heurtin, barely visible at the bottom of the screen, is overpowered by villagers who misunderstand his motives.

That scene is fascinating, too, for the image it conveys of the area surrounding Paris. It's a desolate landscape, more like something we would associate with the northeast of France, rather than the revivifying impression we often get of the Parisian fringes, such as in Duvivier's own La Belle équipe a few years later. The country scenes have none of the life we find in the cafés of Montmartre throughout the film: there's a similar contrast between suburbs and city in Godard'sBande à part. Duvivier also draws an amusing parallel between the insalubrious place Radek spends most of his time and the break room where the Parisian police gather to smoke, drink, and generally let off steam.

Although the film is generally strong in construction - and there are numerous very striking shots exploiting shadows and space - it does stumble in the relative time accorded to Maigret and his prey. Maigret, as most subsequent adaptations recognised, is a fascinating character, but here we learn relatively little about him apart from gathering that he's a very smart, and rather bulky, man. Instead, we spend much time in the company of Radek, a problematic character: although inherited from the book, he's a rather a stereotypical outsider - he's Czech, although Inkijinoff, who was from Siberia, looks much more obviously "foreign" - intent on corrupting the innocent (in every sense) Frenchman. In addition, Inkijinoff isn't nearly as subtle an actor as his colleagues, so it can be hard to take the character seriously - though the fact that Maigret never under-estimates him helps to restore some balance.

Disturbia

2007, US, directed by D.J. Caruso

Rating: ***

Worth a look primarily for its first hour, a generally solid updating/relocation of Hitchcock's Rear Window: the filmmakers re-imagine confinement for the modern teen, as well as voyeurism in a California neighbourhood as opposed to a New York apartment building. That said, the constant shots of binoculars and cameras eventually become a little heavy-handed: we get it, they're spying on the neighbours. If anything, the film is a touch too specific in time and place; you can't help but think some of the references to popular websites will be terribly outdated within five years, never mind 55, but then perhaps no-one sees a long life for this kind of thing. It's a shame, too, that after setting the location up with considerable care, the filmmakers fall back on a very conventional, and completely over the top, dénouement, as if they don't trust themselves to carry off something a touch more subtle.

Poil de carotte

1932, France, directed by Julien Duvivier

Rating: ****

It's not hard to imagine that life for many children in the early 1930s was a less than pleasant experience, with terrible poverty taking its toll, as documented in films like La Maternelle (or Wild Boys of the Road, which I haven't yet seen). There's something more going on here, however, with Duvivier exploring a profound disconnect between adults and children, and the terrible suffering that children endure as a consequence. The director previously filmed the same story in 1925, but clearly felt that the material had more to offer.

While the eponymous Poil de Carotte (Robert Lynen) initially embraces his return to the country after the school year, and runs free through the fields, there's a terrible hole in his life the moment he returns home: his siblings are actively conspiring against him, and his parents, whose marriage is a sham, alternatively abuse and utterly ignore him, with the latter fate especially bitter. Duvivier illustrates the physical distance between Poil de Carotte and those whose acknowledgment he craves, but focuses to an even greater degree on his protagonist's psychology. He dramatizes his inner life through clever use of double and triple exposure, showing conversations between Poil de Carotte's "good" and "bad" sides as the boy lies asleep, and conveying his growing sense of helplessness.

Although some adults sense the boy's troubles, and even endeavour to convey this to the parents - breaking class taboos in the process - they're apparently helpless to effect much change, and there's a distressing sense of inevitability, together with an almost brutal honesty about what a desperate child might consider (an echo again of La Maternelle). Those climatic scenes are almost unbearably tense, and Duvivier also introduces dramatic close-ups to underline the enormity of what may occur. As nuanced as the psychological portrait is, however, the scenes of family life seem less subtle: while Harry Baur is simply a gruff, uncommunicative father, Poil de Carotte's mother (Catherine Fonteney) is a harridan, taking out the failures of her own life on her youngest child, and lacking any sympathy even though her own story has many elements of tragedy. That said, there's something bracing in Duvivier's refusal to contemplate even mild sentimentality in the domestic portrait, with the household dissected without pity.

Un Secret

2007, France, directed by Claude Miller

Rating: ****

There's something immensely pleasurable in coming across a well-made film, where the parts are carefully slotted together and there's a payoff for investing time and energy in the narrative. I suppose it's the old-fashioned idea of "craftsmanship," something that you find in, say, the works of Peter Weir. It's not all that cool, but it's also a remarkably difficult thing to do given all of the imponderables and unpredictabilities of a film shoot. Claude Miller's films are always characterised by this kind of artisanal care, even when they don't always quite succeed as involving stories. His L'Accompagnatrice, with a similar period setting, never came alive for me, and I've read various critiques that find this film to be similarly lifeless: I wonder if that's the point where taste begins to interact with technique, for I found Miller's film to be entirely compelling even when I had occasional questions about the directions in which the narrative was pointing me.

The film plays with time, interweaving episodes from the war years with events from the 1950s and, more briefly, a single day in the 1980s where many aspects of the story finally come together, although we receive much of our information out of order, so that we're constantly - and quite deliberately - questioning whether we've yet encountered the eponymous secret. There's a careful distinction of each period in visual terms, too, although the bright 1950s scenes are not quite what they first seem, and that shimmering veneer is slowly undermined as the film proceeds.

Although there's a story to be told, and a secret to be revealed, Miller is ultimately more interested in issues of identity. Underneath the polished sets and solid acting, there's something surprisingly bold going on, as the film tries to make the point that Jewish experiences of and in the war years were by no means monolithic; one of the main characters (played by Patrick Bruel, still best-known as a singer in France) chafes constantly both against authority (French, German, familial) and what he sees as the confines of his own upbringing. Part of the challenge for the character is reconciling his own instincts with a Jewish identity that is being forced on him by outsiders rather than because it has any importance for him, and yet inevitably his life experiences confront him with difficult questions about his own sense of self. It's one of those films you can imagine dissecting over a beer afterwards, since it tends to pose more questions that it's fully capable of answering.

Scarfies

1999, New Zealand, directed by Robert Sarkies (US Title: Crime 101)

Rating: ***

It's hard to avoid comparing Scarfies with Danny Boyle's début feature Shallow Grave: a motley collection of flatmates, an atmospheric location, an unexpected windfall, an occasionally unsettling blend of violence and comedy, and plenty of visual style. The key difference, however, is that while Shallow Grave featured a very dead benefactor, here the source of the windfall is very much alive, presenting the flatmates with a major dilemma: he's a nasty bit of work, but they have, nonetheless, taken away his income.

As the film progresses, it becomes something of Stanford Prison Experiment in miniature, with the house's inhabitants testing their boundaries as they decide what to do with their prisoner, and their loyalties begin to disintegrate as they begin to contemplate more outlandish solutions; the fun is rapidly leached away once they realize the consequences of their actions. The major weakness here, however, is the fact that the roommates haven't all been sketched in with the same degree of detail: the concerns expressed by Emma (Willa O'Neill) and Scott (Neill Rea) are well-grounded in character, whereas the other roommates are fairly one-note caricatures.

The decrepit old house where the film is set provides plenty of room for visual invention, and Sarkies moves his camera around corners and through floors in clever ways, although it's not always that easy to understand the geography of the place. As much as the film recalls Shallow Grave in its plotline, it's not hard to see the more local influence of Peter Jackson; the hidden horrors and visual trickery aren't a million miles from Jackson's Braindead, although Scarfies is a much more coherent bit of work.

La Rupture

1969, France, directed by Claude Chabrol

Rating: ***.5

The startling opening scene of La Rupture recalls the first few minutes of Hitchcock's Young and Innocent, with both films beginning with sequences of frightening marital strife that apparently conclude in violence. There's no time to settle in to either film, and it's a jarring strategy that ensures we're off balance for the remainder of either film. That La Rupture begins with what seems like an homage to another film is appropriate, too, for Chabrol weaves similar quotations into the remainder of the film - most obviously with the inclusion of a tram scene that references Murnau's Sunrise.

The Hitchcock comparison seems especially apt, given that both films are a blend of themes and tones: Young and Innocent is by turns lightly humorous, tense, and brutal where La Rupture veers from the mundane to the outlandish and drug-addled (with a bizarre film-within-a-film just to top things off). Chabrol's protagonist, played by Stéphane Audran, is a generally credible working mother who finds herself in a strange boarding house filled with comic types (the card-playing old women, the ham actor, the drunken buffoon landlord), and there's a constant sense of being off-balance for we never know quite how a scene will play out: the climactic act of violence comes complete with pop-up comic effects, whereas the matter of a child custody case has more conventional legal discussions and parental jockeying.

Chabrol extends that sense of the unexpected with his filming style, and particularly his editing choices: one shot cuts abruptly to the next, making us wonder how much time has passed or where we are. It's very difficult to make out the geography of the boarding house as a consequence, although the quick cuts do add a great sense of urgency to the film, and particularly help to foster tension when we're never quite sure when a character might reappear to upend carefully laid plans.

(The picture above was taken from Ed Howard's blog; I watched the film on VHS and was unable to get any decent frame grabs).

Strangers on a Train

1951, US, directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Rating: ****.5

I watched this in preparation for David Cairns's Film Club, which he cannily amalgamated with his weekly Hitchcock update on this occasion - he's been watching all of Hitchcock's surviving features week-by-week - so this is as much a reaction to that event as to the film itself. David's done such a fine job of detailing the film's many startling moments - the shot that sticks out for me is the wonderful image where Bruno stands on the steps of the Capitol as Guy, by now thoroughly rattled, drives by in a taxi - and strong performances that I'll focus on just a few ideas.

I first saw the film fifteen years ago, and the main thing that remained with me was the frantic carnival finale, still impressively sweaty here. Watching the film again, though, I was struck by some of the correspondences with Dial M For Murder, particularly the long conversations that open - or nearly open - both films and which introduce the murders which then set the wheels in motion. That the conversation in Strangers on a Train takes place on the rails seems crucial: once Bruno (Robert Walker) gets going with his latest "theory" of perfect murder, he can't be diverted, even when Guy (Farley Granger) shows little apparent interest in the scheme. From the first moment the idea is introduced, there's a sense that Bruno's hurtling along an inevitable path, just as the feet that cross the station in the film's opening minutes seem fated to encounter one another.

There are, of course, more superficial overlaps, too: like Tony Wendice in Dial M For Murder, Guy is a tennis player, and post-playing careers are crucial for the two men, and in both cases a particular woman may complicate those off-court plans. Indeed, sport is seen as a way to forge a path into a different social class: Guy can leave behind the small-town sordidness of his soured marriage for a glittering political career in Washington.

There's also something of a precursor to Hitchcock's use of space in Dial M For Murder, through the use of a map that is supposed to assist Guy in carrying out what Bruno sees as Guy's part of their murderous "bargain." Hitchcock focuses on the document twice, the second time using it to trace a careful path through Bruno's house so that when Guy must find his way in the dark we know exactly where he is at all times. There's no map in the later story, but we're always absolutely certain where the characters are, so carefully does Hitchcock define the geography of his set.